


food for the dead

by gooseberry



Series: The Kingdom [2]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Durin Family Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Azanulbizar, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Thorin returns to her in the late summer, at the end of the season of war. The dwarves with whom she has been living are not unkind, but there’s no love lost between them, and she has been waiting breathlessly for her family to return to her, and to take her away from this place. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>The only one who returns is Thorin, bruised and battered and achingly, achingly alone.</i>
</p><p>---</p><p>In which Thorin returns after the Battle of Azanulbizar, and Dis mourns their dead. Just a lot of Dis-centric feels, because that's how I roll. Also, mourning rituals. And feeding the dead. And libations! Libations are poured.</p>
            </blockquote>





	food for the dead

Thorin returns to her in the late summer, at the end of the season of war. The dwarves with whom she has been living are not unkind, but there’s no love lost between them, and she has been waiting breathlessly for her family to return to her, and to take her away from this place. 

The only one who returns is Thorin, bruised and battered and achingly, achingly alone.

She doesn’t scream, because that would be improper--she did not scream for her mother, and so she will not scream for her grandfather, nor her father, nor her brother. She does not scream, but she falls to the ground and she weeps like a child, wracking sobs that make her feel as though her whole body is being torn apart.

“Dis,” Thorin says, and his voice is as battered as his body; hoarse with the cries of battle (or maybe the wailing of the mourning). He is trying to gather her up into his arms, from the floor of the ugly little house he left her in, and she lets him; she needs him to hold her together, because she is being torn apart.

“I’m sorry,” Thorin tells her, and it’s not enough; it will never be enough. She clutches at him, digging her fingers into the flesh of his arms, and she chokes her sobs out against his chest. Her face grows hot and wet, and her chest aches with her breathlessness. She’s not sure what she’s meant to say, because this is not the way things were supposed to be. 

“I’m sorry,” Thorin says, too little and too empty. For all that he’s holding her up, he’s not looking at her face, and his hands feel distant, as though there are layers of earth between them.

“How?” Dis asks, but maybe the better question is _Why?_ She asks that, too, and Thorin gives her his nothings.

“It was terrible, Dis,” he tells her, and she knows terrible--she remembers the smell of dragonfire and taste of dwarvish ash. She knows the horror of having a kingdom of thousands, burnt away to only hundreds.

“The bodies?” she asks when she can, and Thorin says, in that same wretched voice,

“Burnt.”

She moans low in her throat, a sound she didn’t know she could make. It reverberates through her like the quaking of the earth, from her throat to her fingertips. 

The day passes in a daze: she cries, and she sleeps, and she lies on the floor of her borrowed room, staring at the low ceiling above her. Thorin speaks sometimes, muttering in a voice too low for her to understand; most of the time, though, he is silent. The night passes the same way: she sleeps fitfully, and she lies awake for hours, crying as quietly as she can. The tears slide down either side of her face, until her hair is wet and sticky. 

It’s a wretched thing, to be broken-hearted. It’s all wretched, from the way she can’t bear to cry anymore, to the way that she can’t stop crying; from the way she doesn’t want to sleep, to the way that she doesn’t want to be awake, either. She spends long hours staring at the ceiling, until the floor beneath her head is too wet to bear. Then she rolls onto her side, and stares at the base of the wall.

“I couldn’t bring them back,” Thorin says in the morning. It’s an excuse she never asked for. The only _why_ she cares about is _Why Thror?_ and _Why Thrain?_ and _Why Frerin?_ She wants to understand their deaths, the way their bodies broke and how their breath stopped and where their blood spilled. The loss of their bodies is only sand on the millstone of her confused grief.

“I understand,” she says when Thorin’s been staring at her for a long time. He nods, then turns away again, turning back to his own grief. 

They rattle through her little room, like fragments of shell rock in a pail. It feels as though she is all fragile edges, ready to be ground to dust and slivers of herself. She walks around the circuit of her room--four steps to the fireplace, and three steps from that to her bed; two steps to pass the doorway, and two more to pass her little chest--and she walks the steps again and again, in a circle that moves from west to east. She touches the wall, the doorframe, the nail-studs of her chest. She rests her head against the foot of her bed, her arms folded up over her head.

“You should take the bed,” Thorin says when Dis sways with her grief, her body pressed against the edge of the bed.

She feels like she might disappear into shell-dust, ground down by the rattling in her body, the quivering growth of pain in her ribs. And dust--

“Their ashes,” she asks, “Where are they?”

What Thorin says is, “We never found Father.” And then, “There were so many bodies, Dis. And some--we couldn’t name them all.”

She crawls onto the bed as he crawls off it. They don’t touch as they pass each other. It is when she is sitting on her bed, looking at her hands, that the enormity of everything hits her again. It comes on suddenly, and without warning. She looks at her thumbs, at the way second joint curves out, at the pinkish color of her nail, and she thinks, _I will never see my father’s hands again._ She doesn’t know if she has her mother’s thumbs, or her father’s, and now she’ll never know; she’ll never be able to look at either of her parents, and she’ll never be able to wonder whom she is more like.

She pitches forward, pressing her face against the blanket on her bed. The wool is scratchy, but it blocks out the light of the room, and when she breathes in, it feels like she’s about to suffocate. She breathes slowly, shallowly, and wonders if she could bury herself with her grief.

x

On the third day, she rises from her bed, fetches her knife, and shaves her head.

She’s never done this before--she’d been too young when Erebor fell, and her cousins had only wrapped her head in dark scarves. Now, though, she’s the only one left, so she washes her hair, then braids it into long, thick plaits. As thick as her hair may be, her knife passes through easily; her head feels light without her hair weighing it down, as though whatever was holding her to the earth is lifting from her. 

She cuts off braid after braid, then shaves her head, scraping the knife over her scalp. The edge of the knife is sharp, and it cuts into her scalp, shaving both hair and skin from her scalp. The back of her shirt is wet with blood by the time she is half-done, and her eyes are stinging from the pain. When she is finished with her scalp, she runs her fingers through her beard, then she shaves that, too.

When Thorin sees her, he gives a loud, low moan, like it is his scalp that is bleeding. He kneels beside her, reaching for the knife that she’s still holding in her lap, and she moves her knife to her other hand, holding it away from her body and out of Thorin’s reach.

“You can’t,” she says, feeling absent and a little detached from it all. She can barely feel Thorin’s hands on her knees, the way he’s gripping tightly at her. “You’re a king now, you can’t shave your head.”

“But you,” Thorin says, and Dis leans over to press a faint kiss to Thorin’s hair.

“You’re a king,” she repeats, “and I am not.”

She lets him wash her scalp, because he looks like he might weep. She’s not sure what it says about them, that he can remain dry-eyed over his grandfather and father and brother, but weep over his sister’s shaved head; or perhaps, she thinks, she is being unfair, and it is the mourning that drives Thorin so close to madness.

(It is driving _her_ close to madness, this huge, aching loss in her chest, which is threatening to devour her whole.)

“Let me,” Thorin begs her, his hands still wrapped around her knees, his face turned up towards hers; he looks less like a king, and more like her brother. “If an infection--”

She doesn’t think she would mind an infection, and that thought frightens her. She takes a deep, shaky breath, then ducks her head so he can wash it with warm water and soap. The long scrapes in her scalp sting, bring tears to her eyes, and she lies her knife in her lap, and fists her hands in the legs of her trousers. Thorin’s fingers are thick but deft, and when he smooths ointment over her head, he does so gently. Her scalp is tender, though, and even Thorin’s gentleness is painful to her. 

She leaves her head bare. For the first few days, the scrapes sluggishly ooze blood, but they begin to heal. (Everything, if given enough time, begins to heal.) The open scrapes become rough scabs, which crack and break when she scowls or touches her scalp. Her scalp begins to itch fiercely, and she wishes that her family could heal as quickly as her skin.

On the fourteenth day, she rubs her hands over her scabbed head. Her scalp is prickly with growing hair, and the hair scratches at her palms. She had never shaved her head before, and this is all new--this type of mourning is new, this type of all-consuming grief. She lies in her bed for hours at a time, covering her face and her head with her hands. 

Thorin lies across the foot of her bed, his head resting on her calves, his legs hanging off the side of the bed. She listens to him breathe--a horrible raspy sound, like Thorin is always about to cry. She always feels like _she’s_ about to cry: the hiccup in the back of her throat, the hot dryness of her eyes, the feeling of coal shoved in between her ribs. Sometimes she bites it back. Other times, she cries as hard as she can, though it never feels like she’s crying enough.

When she cries, Thorin grabs her ankle and holds onto it tightly. If he was Frerin, she knows that he’d hold her hand; if he was Frerin, he’d lie on the bed side-by-side with her, and he’d cry with her. It’s Thorin who came back, though, and it’s Frerin who left her. It is all Thorin can do, she thinks, to hold onto her ankle and to rub salve onto her scalp. It’s all Thorin can do, to breathe as though he’s about to cry. There is fragility in Thorin’s distance, in the tightness of his grip and wheezing of his breath.

“I have to make cakes,” Dis says. Thorin says nothing, but his hand tightens around her ankle. Dis takes deep breaths, and waits as long as she can; when Thorin’s grip loosens, she sits up, and she bends over enough to kiss him gently. 

“Help me?” she asks, because this is something she can share.

“I will,” Thorin says, but when Dis rises from her bed, Thorin stays behind, still lying across the foot of her bed. If he was Frerin, she would cover him with a blanket, or maybe even give him a pillow; she’d brush his hair back and perhaps kiss the pulse in his wrist. If it was Frerin, she would be so much more gentle, so much more careful. If it was Frerin, she’d meet his fragility with her own.

“Get up, then,” she says instead. Thorin makes no move, though, and so Dis tugs at his sleeve, then smooths away the crease. His fragility makes her feel like shards of obsidian, and his silence makes her feel thick-tongued. This isn’t a role she was prepared to play. She knows the broad width of Thorin’s back, the stillness of his hands and the jut of his jaw; she doesn’t know the falling of his shoulders, or the trembling of his hands, or the slackness of his face. This dwarf is new, her brother reforged and recast into some broken king, pieces of Thror beat into Thorin’s mold.

She makes honey cakes, each cake the size of her palm, and she cooks them in white ashes. The flour was sitting on the floor outside her door, a bowl of honey and berries beside it: the kindness of the unbereft. She cooks their pity into cakes, each the size of her palm--the size of her heart. The ashes are hot and fine, like a dust, and she thinks it’s unfair.

When the dragon came, the ashes had been dark and wet, greasy smears of what had once been thousands of souls. Death, she thinks, is never so white or fine; it is always an ugly thing, a sickness that coats your skin and a smell like burning hair.

She cooks the cakes, ten and twenty and more, and she piles them beside herself, each little cake the size of her heart and palm.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Thorin says behind her when she is brushing the ashes from a honey cake. It’s an admittance, and Dis thinks it might be the first time she has heard Thorin admit he doesn’t know how to do something.

Dis lays the last cake to her side, then she gingerly runs her hands over her scalp. The scabs are rough and catch at the creases of her palms, and she runs her hands over her head three times before she hides her eyes behind her hands.

“I think,” she says from behind her hands, “you should sit beside me.”

Thorin burns the cakes with her, and he sits beside her, his shoulder and knee pressed against her shoulder and knee. “Tomorrow,” he says, “I’ll get a goat.”

The second meal is meat--the second meal is always meat, so Dis nods as she lays a last honey cake on the fire. It burns quickly, blackening and crumbling in the flames. As it crumbles, Thorin asks, “Do you wish it had been Frerin who came home?”

“Yes,” she says, and Thorin says,

“So do I.”

They eat after that, splitting the remaining honey cakes between them. The cakes are dry and the honey saps the moisture from their mouths, and so they drink, too, more unwatered wine than they should. They pass the wine back and forth between them until they’re drunk, and then they pass back and forth their heartaches and secrets.

“I loved Frerin the most,” Dis says. She is holding Thorin’s hand tightly, as though if she squeezes hard enough, she can make Thorin understand what she’s trying to say.

“I,” Thorin answers, “always loved you the most.”

She wonders if her fingers feel as feverishly hot as Thorin’s, or if her palm feels as sweaty. When Thorin tucks his thumb around hers, she wonders if he is as unsure in his footing as she is. She’s never mourned like this before: never so alone, and never so wholeheartedly. She’s never spoken to Thorin like this before, either, as though they won’t wake up tomorrow, as though they will never have time to regret anything they say.

“Because I’m the last daughter of Durin?” she asks Thorin. Thorin makes a sound, then says, 

“And I am his last son.”

But this isn’t about Dis, and it isn’t about Thorin, either. This is meant to be for Thror, and for Frerin, and maybe even for Thrain. This is for the dead--all the season of mourning.

x

They feed their dead for twenty days. The first meal is honey cakes, to break the fast; the second is meat, to feed the hunger; the third is wine, to slake the thirst. Sweetness, and savoriness, and tartness. Dis burns the greater portion of each meal, and she breathes in the smoke as though the smoke will fill the gaping hole in her belly; when the meals are burnt, she buries the ashes beneath cool, dry dirt. On the days of drink, she pours wine over stone, and on the days of light, she pours oil instead. Her fingertips grow tender and red from the fires, and her skin grows soft from the oil. The hole in her belly, where her heartache and love gnaw at her, stays empty.

“You’re growing thin,” Thorin tells her near the end of their mourning. He gestures at her face then her neck, and Dis runs her hand over the dry stubble on her cheek. 

“Your face,” Thorin says, “is growing thin. You should eat more.”

“Am I a waif?” she asks idly, and then she says, the thought sickeningly fascinating, “We’re orphans now, the two of us.”

Thorin makes a noise, then says, “A generation of orphans,” as he grasps at her hand. His fingers are cold and they feel good against the tender, burned skin of her fingertips.

They burn their mourning, the way Thorin had burned their dead. There’s a hole in Dis’s belly, but she’s lost her hunger somewhere in all of her sorrow, and she doesn’t know how to fill herself anymore. She feeds herself methodically, the remnants of the feasts she burns for her family. When she’d been a girl--when she had been a daughter--she’d been fed the choicest pieces of meat, the sweetest of the cakes.

“If you could eat anything,” she asks Thorin one day, as they’re sitting on the floor, “what would it be?”

Thorin’s hands are spread over his knees, his fingers curled his kneecaps, his thumbs loose. The second joints of his thumbs curve out, just like Dis’s; Dis wonders if Thorin knows whose thumbs he has, if Thorin thinks he’s more like Bestla or like Thrain.

“Venison,” Thorin says after a moment, “or an orange. I haven’t had one since Erebor.”

“I’d want swan,” Dis tells him, not waiting for him to ask. “Father promised it, once, but I’ve never had it.”

Thorin doesn’t promise it to her; Thorin, she knows, doesn’t make promises. That had been Frerin, always so desperate to make her happy, to promise her the world. She’d been promised a kingdom, and now she has nothing but a brother who rarely smiles and fingers that are scorched red.

They feed their dead; they offer food and drink and light until the days of mourning are done. When the days are over, and the season of mourning is done, Dis wraps a scarf over her scalp. She ties it at the nape of her neck, a fat knot that looks like a rose; the scarf is a deep purplish-red, the color of a bruise.

“We’ll go west,” Dis decides as she fingers the knot at the nape of her neck. She would like, she thinks, to grow out her hair again; to wear heavy braids and full skirts and a gold chain around her neck. She thinks she would like to be a different dwarf in a different world, less a queen and more a sister. 

“The two of us together,” she says, and she means it as a promise and maybe as forgiveness. She means it desperately, because she doesn’t think she could walk very far at all without Thorin; she doesn’t think she could bear to live without him, and she thinks that he, with all his brittle strength, must need her just as much.

“Wherever you go,” Thorin says, and when he kisses her burnt fingers, scorched from all her mourning, she tells him,

“I’m glad you came home to me, Thorin.”


End file.
